Hidden treasures

Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

Each one of us unknowingly leaves a little of ourselves in cars we've owned and sold along the way. Over the years I've enjoyed items I've found in cars during a restoration, or while performing a good cleanup. People leave all kinds of stuff in the glove box, under the seats (particularly under the back seat), in the trunk, and so on. I've found some really oddball items in cars I've worked on and each was an artifact belonging to a previous owner or... ?
"Or?" you say? While doing the restoration of a mid-1960s GTO interior, I removed all the seats and door panels. Usually, I get the vacuum out and clean miscellaneous debris from the bottom of the doors and make sure the drain holes are not clogged up. I stuck the hose down into the passenger side front door and started to hear the small stuff coming up through the pipe. Suddenly, something clogged the tube. There was an old, faded and stained Daisy cardboard drinking cup, like we used to get from coffee vending machines 40 years ago, stuck on the hose. Obviously, an assembly line worker was too lazy to take it to the trash, so he sent it to me as a little time capsule 30 years later.
Whenever I brought a new project home, the kids would immediately ask me to pull out the back seat. In the past, I would always find loose change and split it up between the children. Usually it wasn't much, maybe a dollar or less in miscellaneous coins. So Saturday rolls around and we get to takin' out the back seat. Whoa! The floor under the seat was full of coins, along with several little girls' berets, marbles, a couple hundred candy wrappers and assorted dried-up pretzels, cookies and other petrified stuff. Obviously, several little people regularly traveled in the back of this '69 muscle machine and pushed whatever they didn't want down between the seat back and bottom. We collected around three dollars from that vehicle and filled half a trashcan.
Sometime in the mid-1980s I bought a '70 Buick GSX from the original owner. It had experienced an interior fire caused by an electrical short. The interior was a mess, with melted headliner dripping down on the seats, and the gauge lenses and windows were blackened. It also smelled terrible, but the price was right. I actually put it in a garage I rented and let it sit for a couple of months with all the windows open while I accumulated the parts I needed to fix the damage. Finally, I brought it home and started stripping out the mess. I pulled out the driver's seat and stepped back wide-eyed; there was a gun on the floor, which had been hidden under the seat. I put the remnants of the seat down and got a rag to pick up the blackened six-shooter pistol. Relieved, I quickly realized that at one point in its life it had been a plastic chrome-plated Roy Rogers special. Whether it was used to intimidate other freeway drivers or forgotten by a young son, we'll never know, but for a minute it was just a shocking find!
The dashboard in that same GSX had been damaged by the fire so I found a mint original in a junkyard as a replacement. With the rarity of the GSX, I tore the car apart looking for the factory build sheet, as I received no paperwork at all with the car. It still had the original paint and the correct paint code on the cowl tag, so I was sure it was not a bogus car. Consequently, after looking in all the usual places and finding nothing, I finally gave up. I had all the parts to restore the instruments and the replacement pad, so I yanked out the original damaged parts. I was giving the under-dash area a good cleaning when I noticed a rolled-up paper stuffed between a Y-shaped brace on the driver's side. With the dashboard in place, this area would have been totally obscured. I carefully removed and unrolled it. Yup, there was my treasure map: the factory build sheet in almost mint condition. Wahoo!
This is a charming little story: In the 1980s I purchased a '70 green-on-green GTO hardtop from the son of the original owner. The interior was mint and as I remember, it had only about 57,000 on the odometer. While discussing the sale of the car, the man told me that his dad had purchased the car but died a few years later. His mom kept driving it until she passed away at age 85. He said she used it primarily to get to church and the store. The overall condition verified these facts. So I drove it home and started my usual in-depth exploration. The glove box contained every paper relating to the original purchase, maintenance, insurance, etc. That was a great find, so I proceeded to the center console. As I pulled out more papers, etc, I uncovered a touching site. At the bottom of the console there lay a pair of small white lace gloves, obviously belonging to the previous elderly owner. I mailed them back to her son.
I've owned several '70 Challengers. One was a very rough red-over-black R/T SE convertible. This was in the late 1980s. The car ran and drove, but otherwise it was a mess. It literally needed everything, but it was a rust-free California car. When I went to look at the car, the owner didn't have a trunk key so I couldn't check the trunk floor for rust. I bought it anyway and almost made it home. But that's another story. After several weeks, I took it to a locksmith and he opened the decklid. There was a bald spare and a dirty car cover with miscellaneous junk on top of it. I removed the cover to check out the floor and there was an almost complete six-pack carb setup sitting there smiling at me. Oh, the joy!
Sometimes you're the windshield, and sometimes you're the bug. Enjoy your treasure hunting.

This article originally appeared in the August, 2007 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.